


Strange Creatures- A Newtina/Doctor Who AU Fic

by Porcupine19



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Awkward Romance, F/M, Fantastic Beasts, Female Doctor (Doctor Who), I'm Sorry, Movie 2: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Newt is a Dork, Newt was a soldier, Post-World War I, Romance, Theseus Scamander Didn't Survive the War in this Universe, doctor who - Freeform, newtina
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-08-20 15:38:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16558508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Porcupine19/pseuds/Porcupine19
Summary: What would happen if the 13th Doctor regenerated into the body of Katherine Waterston, and the personality of Tina Goldstein? Well, we all know what kind of man she'd invite into the TARDIS with her...London, October 1926. In the back rooms of the Natural History Museum, Newton Scamander is hiding away from the world, and away from the years of grief and loneliness it's brought him. He's content, or so he tells himself, with a quiet life away from the bad memories, studying fascinating and beautiful creatures from all over the world.Thousands of feet above him, however, the TARDIS is burning- and a mysterious, bizarre, unexplainable woman is about to crash out of the sky and into Newt's life. Unfortunately, they're about to cross paths with something much less friendly. As the Doctor struggles to navigate her regeneration (her shoes are too small and she's craving hotdogs), and Newt grapples with his first human connection in years, can they find themselves- and the deadly threat, lurking in the museum- before it's too late?





	1. Don't Break the Custard Cream Dispenser!

The 15th of November, 1926, was a quiet and perfectly unremarkable night in the city of London. Motorcars rumbled through the streets, businessmen walked briskly either to their homes or to less reputable establishments, and policemen fidgeted on street corners while entertaining vague hopes of something exciting happening, but with dismally low expectations.  
None of them could have known, of course, that among the clouds something was indeed happening- something that few in the bustling city could have ever imagined.

Twenty thousand feet above their heads a dark blue box, with "POLICE" written on the side, was hurtling like a comet through the night. The doors were wide open, and inside it was burning. Anyone watching would have said it was like staring into the sun itself, so bright and full of radiant power it threatened to burn the eyes of all who looked on it. It was hot enough to melt steel, strong enough to go crashing through solid rock, violent enough to bring down palaces and tear the ground from under the feet of whole civilisations.

And in the midst of the fire- of the terrible, beautiful brightness- there stood, upright and unwavering, a figure.

A woman.

And she, too, was burning.

The light, however, was not blasting her to ashes or ripping her apart- it was infused into her very being. It was at one with her, becoming her. Indeed, it almost seemed to emanate directly from her body, from her soul.

And as the woman stood there- her yellow hair and blue coat flying out in all directions, her mouth open in a scream of agony and her arms thrown out, as though she were about to fly- she began to change. The golden light flooding out of her body in all directions, her limbs began to transform, growing to fit the rest of her body which was itself shooting upwards. Her face changed its shape, and became younger, her eyebrows darker, her hair growing in length as the yellow melted away to be replaced by wild, dark tresses cascading down her back like a thunderstorm in the black of mid-winter.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the light began to flicker and die, vanishing completely as with a final cry of pain, the woman's head snapped forward, gasping, her eyes wide with shock. She staggered with a yelp, and fell hands-first onto the console of her burning ship.

New hands... She examined them. Bit longer than the old ones, thinner fingers- same skin colour though. 

All her old memories, though- they were right there, all jumbled up but still defiantly there. She was the same woman, the same  _person_ she'd always been. But in a different body- a new body. She nervously placed her hands everywhere she could think of. Yup- new head, new arms, new legs, new large and small intestines, new hearts, both working just fine. And a new personality to go with them, although she wasn't quite sure what that was yet.

But the Doctor didn't have much time to enjoy her new body. As she shoved the mess of brunette locks out of her face the box gave a sudden, violent lurch. As she stumbled and fell again sparks began to fly, and yet more small fires broke out to join the flames already dancing all over her ship. It began to shake this way and that as if it was having a seizure, as more bits and bobs exploded with loud bangs and a wheezing, screeching noise emitted from the core, as though the metal itself was screaming in pain. The Doctor- thank goodness, she remembered her name this time- looked behind her at the open doors. Cold air was blasting through them, feeding the hungry flames and making them grow hotter and stronger by the nanosecond. She just had time, by the constellations, to register which solar system she was in, when the noise from the console was suddenly silenced.

And slowly, almost gracefully, her ship began to fall.

"Oh no. Oh no- no no no no no no no- oh- aaaaaaah!"

She tightened her grip on the console and frantically dug her feet into the floor as the Tardis abandoned her freefall- only to bounce and tumble through the sky like a demented overgrown yo-yo.

'Oh no you- don't you dare. Don't even think about it! You are NOT throwing me out again, no ma'am, not after last time!" (Blimey, was she American now? That certainly was a new one.)

Still desperately holding on with her right hand, she began pushing buttons and flicking switches. She couldn't quite recall what all of them actually did but something was bound to happen, surely. It had to, right?

BANG! BANG!

"AAAARGH! Stupid, blasted, stupid regeneration! And you're not being much help either, young lady!"

VWOOOORRRRP BANG!

"Ok- ok! I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry I keep doing it inside you, sweetheart. That came out kinda weird but you know what I mean. I'll try not to next time, ok? I promise. I pinky-promise. But look, we gotta get out of here! I don't want to crash-land you again!"

VWORP- VWORP!

"I"M SORRY, OKAY? But you've gotta dematerialise, we've gotta find a way- aaah!"

The ship jerked angrily to the side again with another VWORP- VWORP- VWOOOORRRP!

"Well, you know what? I don't care! You hear me? You're gonna pull us outta here and you're gonna do it now. And let me tell you right now, I'll be running diagnostics on you when we land and you'd really, really better not have broken the custard cream dispens- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

The box had suddenly tipped backwards, the still wide open doors facing the ground. Far below, she could see the lights of a city as her feet were yanked away from the floor, the harsh cold air threatening to suck her out and send her, for the second time, tumbling away into the blackness. For the briefest of seconds it succeeded- but then, desperately reaching up with no time for decisions or even conscious thought, she managed to grab a lever that was thankfully still attached to the console. She was all but flying, clinging on with only one hand but, gritting her teeth with a bestial snarl, she refused to let go. She would not, would never let go. This was her TARDIS. Her ship. And they would not abandon each other again. After all, Yaz, Graham and Ryan weren't around any more; the thought of Yaz, in particular, made her hearts ache with an intensity she hadn't felt since River- but there was no time to think about that. More loud bangs issued from all around her as she tightened her grip on the lever, her legs kicking against the nothingness, and yet more parts of her beautiful ship exploded in eruptions of fiery sparks as, yet again, it began to jerk as though it were fitting. She was flung this way and that, frantically trying not to let go- she tried to reach up and grab something with her other arm, but these limbs weren't strong enough yet and the TARDIS was moving about too much- her hand was getting more and more slippery with sweat- she couldn't do this much longer, she was going to fall-

Then, all at once, as though the whole episode had never happened, the TARDIS flipped back upright. The banging stopped, as did the screeching noise from the ship's core. Except for the crackling of the many fires, and the relieved-but-still-slightly-terrified panting of the woman now almost slumped over the console, all was silent. The TARDIS hung suspended in mid-air, as still as the moon (at least when it wasn't hatching- blimey, that had been a day), frozen as much in time as she was in space. Taking advantage of this momentary lull, the Doctor adjusted her grip, and took hold of a joystick with her other hand. (Just in case.)

"Phew. You ok?"

No answer.

"C'mon, babe. Tell me. What is it?"

But the TARDIS remained still and silent; the Doctor rolled her eyes with a huff. "Well, how about you dematerialise then? Come  _on_ , this is getting ridiculous. I stole you so we could have some fun, not so you could sit around and sulk! Now pull yourself together-" she wrenched the joystick towards her- "and get a shift on!"

She realised too late that this was entirely the wrong thing to say. A terrible, screeching VWORP exploded out of the ship's core and then, before she could respond, before she could do anything, the TARDIS began to fall. Desperately holding on with her left hand, trying not to let go completely, she began pressing button after button with her right, trying to find anything at all that might stop her beautiful Ghost Monument from crashing down onto the city far below. But her scream of "DON'T YOU DARE-" was lost to the howling wind as the TARDIS dropped like a stone, gathering speed, coming closer and closer to its terminal velocity- and closer to her inevitable, final destination, smashing to pieces on the cold, hard ground.

And there was nothing she could do to stop it.


	2. A Man and His Beasts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Newt Scamander!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse what I'm sure is a complete lack of scientific and possibly historical accuracy in this thing. I don't know what I'm doing (and I definitely don't know what the Natural History Museum looked like in the 1920s).  
> Enjoy x

It was many hours after closing time, and the Natural History Museum (London, England) was as still and silent as the cathedral it resembled. The lights had been dimmed to a gentle, tepid glow, and the last few stragglers- cleaners, tour guides, naturalists- were plunging back into the damp city streets, presided over by the cold eyes of Charles Darwin's gleaming marble statue. By nine o'clock the place was utterly deserted. Well... almost.

Tucked away in a laboratory near the back of the structure, housed in a gleaming specimen tank far from visitors' prying eyes, were a pair of large, decadently patterned indigo butterflies. Watching over them, with eyes as intently focused as but far more compassionate than the Darwin statue, was a thin young man with brown, tousled hair, a battered blue-grey overcoat stuffed carelessly under his stool. He was watching the butterflies with rapt, almost devout attention, occasionally looking away to scribble down a note or two, or to take a hurried gulp of black tea from the chipped cup beside him.  
The night was Newton Scamander's favourite time to be in the museum. There was much less noise without his colleagues and the hordes of visitors around- and as long as he was careful and avoided the security guards, he could wander around the museum as much as he liked with nothing but his own thoughts to disturb him. No laughter or pointless chatting, no scratching of pens of shrill cry of telephones or whistling of the kettle. No-one for company but himself- and, at this moment, the two butterflies. Their species had only been recently discovered in the wilds of South America, and he was investigating their fascinating, intricate mating ritual. Their understated, perfectly natural beauty was a far cry from his flat about half an hour's walk away, with its leaky taps, occasional cockroach incursions and peeling wallpaper stained by his predecessor's cigarette smoke. Then again, it wasn't so bad, that place. It had all his books in it, after all- and a lovely old gramophone, and some cosy patchwork quilts and blankets that he'd "borrowed" from his family's house in Devon.  
The one thing it didn't have was any animals and for that, he could not forgive it. If only, along with the quilts, he could have brought one of his mother's prize racehorses, or one of his father's terriers. (He loathed his father's enjoyment of hunting for sport, but he couldn't hold it against the dogs. It wasn't as if they knew any better, after all.) He'd have loved a dog for company- or a cat, or a parrot, or a couple of rats (why were people scared of rats, for goodness' sake?) but he knew that would never happen because, most unfortunately, his landlord was the Antichrist.

What he really, really wanted, as much as he loved his work here, was to go back to the countryside, to the sky and the sea and the cold, clear air. Take Dougal out for a nice, long walk on the moors; sit on the cliff with a flask of tea and watch the various beautiful sea birds, get all the rattling mechanical noise and filthy London smog out of his head once and for all...

But he couldn't. He couldn't go home, not now. For all Devonshire's beauty, there was too much sadness in that house. It hung in the air like a thick, noxious gas, of the kind that had brought so many men to a hideous death while he'd watched, powerless to save them. He had no desire to breathe it in again.

Blinking hard, he forced his attention back to the butterflies. They were now halfway through their courtship dance- two fluttering, paper-thin blurs of deep purple, whirling and tumbling about like a living hurricane. He was vaguely reminded of children holding hands and spinning as fast as they could- the heady rush of excitement, the intoxicating dizziness, the playful yet steely tussle for power as you waited to see who would go down first. The female kept flying just a little higher than the male, he noted- and suspected that that was rather the entire point. She was teasing him, testing him- seeing how far he'd go for her, what dizzying heights he'd dare to scale. There was both a beauty and a strength to her challenge: don't think I'll stop, nothing scares me. I am a queen, and there is no height I will not conquer. So come on- come and get me. Prove that you're strong enough, to rule by my side.

He shook his head, chuckling a little. Listen to him- these were butterflies, not fairy-tale characters, and he was a scientist- a naturalist- not a poet. His job was to deal in cold, hard fact, not to turn a simple biological process into dramatic, poetic stories and assign human emotions to non-human creatures, however beautiful they appeared to his tired, world-weary eyes.

As he watched, as quickly as they had risen the butterflies began to sink, gently tumbling to the floor of their tank. As Newt watched, the female seemed to do the same, hovering just a centimetre in the air as the male began to perform a series of odd wiggling movements, flapping his wings with a sporadic yet precise frenzy. The nuptial dance, the final stage of courtship- although this one's movements were very different to those of other species he'd observed. The wing movements seemed faster, less controlled. Then again, perhaps this one was just a bit hyperactive (or very, very on heat). Newt snorted- and then immediately felt a pang of grief, horribly twisting his insides. That was exactly the kind of joke his brother would have made, if he were here. If.

He shook himself out of the reverie. The important question: was this common practise within the species, or was "his" male an anomaly? If he could get the chance to learn more about them, observe some more mating pairs- that way, he'd be able to-

BANG.

Newt jumped- his body quite literally exited the seat for a moment- jogging the table and upending his mug of tea. It plummeted to the floor and shattered as the butterflies shot into the air, flittering madly and bouncing off the sides of the tank as if they'd lost all sense of direction, their would-be amorous night apparently forgotten. Apart from them, however, all was still.

He gripped the table, his whole body trembling madly, unable to quite breathe properly. For a moment there, he'd thought- such a loud noise and so close, it had sounded so much like... He closed his eyes, and forced himself to steady his breathing. It was alright. It was alright. This was London, not Ypres, and there were no shells here. No bombs. No explosions. No war.

But then... what  _was_ that noise? 

Cursing, he picked up the shards of crockery and threw them into the waste-paper basket. Thank goodness the tea had gone on the floor and not on his notes, he thought as he grabbed a threadbare tea towel and mopped it up. Perhaps he should go and see what exactly had made that noise- but then again, he'd been studying these butterflies for days with no results until today, and he could hardly leave the poor things alone in this st-

**BANG!**

The second noise was much louder than the first, louder even than one of the shells at Ypres, seeming to shake the foundations of the building itself. The whole room shook- jars fell off walls and smashed, liquid and dead creatures splattering horribly across the floor, chairs toppled over and landed with a CRASH- the tables wobbled violently too, along with the butterflies' tank, which he grabbed and held upright just in time. It was worse than a thunderstorm, than an earthquake, and suddenly he was back in the trenches again- cowering behind a wall of mud and corpses, waiting for the shelling to stop, praying to any god who might be listening that they wouldn't land on Theseus and him-

But the bombardments had always died down. Forcing himself to keep breathing, Newt steadied himself on the desk as the vibrations gradually subsided.

There was no point dwelling on that time; it was over now. Over and done with. Carefully, he lifted the butterfly tank and placed it back in its usual storage space with the other live insect specimens, making it as snug and secure as he could. He'd seen enough animals of all shapes and sizes under stress, to know that the poor things were far too rattled to do anything else tonight. There was nothing for it; he'd have to set off and find either the source of the noise, or one of the security guards. Make sure that no-one was in danger, and that nothing important was broken and, if he could, help out.

That was all he'd ever wanted to do, really. It was why Theseus had joined up, all those years ago. To help. And in the end, it was what he had died for. Well, Newt thought, grabbing a torch from his bag, maybe this isn't a battlefield. Maybe I'm not in Europe. And maybe I only ended up in that blasted place because of the bloody Military Service Act. But if someone's in trouble here- well, wish me luck, Theseus. I'll do what I can.

He held his breath as his footsteps echoed through the corridors, scanning every nook and cranny with his torch, but for a good ten minutes he heard and saw nothing. The place was as silent as a mausoleum.

Too silent, in fact. Where were the security guards? He'd barely spoken to any of them, but he knew  _someone_ should be here. As Professor Fawley had once said, " _Someone_ has to make sure young Scamander doesn't go smuggling the animals out, and setting them free in Regent's Park or some such place." And with something like this happening- surely they should be searching all over the place too?  More to the point- the whole building had been shaking. That bang was loud enough to have been heard several blocks away. Why hadn't the police- why hadn't anyone- shown up to see what was going on? He should hear voices, footsteps, even sirens. But there was nothing.

Then he turned a corner, into the Birds of Paradise exhibition, and his heart stopped.

The vast room certainly looked as though a small bomb had gone off inside it. Except for a few lucky ones on the edges, every case had been shattered, fragments of broken glass littering the floor. On top of them, like grotesque Christmas decorations, lay dozens if not hundreds of iridescent stuffed birds, from tiny hummingbirds to large, ungainly toucans, either blasted or knocked off their perches. Newt had always loathed the practice of killing the poor things for no other reason than to show them off like expensive vases; now, scattered on the ground like this, they looked sadder and more unmistakeably dead than ever. Many whole cases now lay on their sides. And in the midst of it all...

Newt walked slowly towards it, gripping his torch, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing. In the middle of the room, the epicentre for all the destruction, there sat a gigantic, black orb- or, at least, the remains of one. It lay in two jagged pieces, like a broken eggshell; it had clearly been hollow. But no bird could possibly have ever laid an egg like this. It was taller than him, and he was by no means a short man. As he moved closer, the pieces of glass crunching under his feet, he could see it was made of some kind of thick, very strong metal. A horrible thought came to him: had something been inside that? But then... where had it come from? He glanced around him. The ceiling and walls were completely intact, but it couldn't have just _appeared_ there... 

And then, from far off, somebody screamed.

Newt's heart seemed to plummet out of his chest and through his stomach, shattering on the floor like the glass of the bird cases. For a second, he considered running for a telephone and calling the police (whyhadn't they already come? Where  _was_ everyone?)- but the nearest room with a telephone was back the way he'd come, in the opposite direction to the scream, and if someone was in danger-

His mind made up, Newt lept through the jagged pieces of the bizarre metal object, and ran like hell towards the sound. He'd always been quicker on his feet than he looked, and had a lot of stamina for one so skinny, so he made it to the other side of the museum within a couple of minutes, only a little out of breath. 

Approaching the end of another corridor, he heard voices, and felt a spark of relief. He could see shadows, too, the people casting them moving about just out of sight. But he crept nervously along the left-hand wall, his heart hammering, and resisted the urge to call out. This was partly because he tended to avoid raising his voice (or speaking to other people at all, if possible)- but mainly because of the voices themselves.

They didn't sound like the rough London tones of the guards, or even like English; in fact, they didn't seem to speak any human language at all- and he should know, he'd crossed paths with chaps form every corner of the world during the war. No, these ones just didn't sound human. They were too harsh and too sharp, and the only "words" he could hear were a series of rasping, gargling noises. He switched off his torch and then, slowly, hardly daring to breathe, he drew closer.

At last he came to the very edge of the corridor, and peered around the wall. And what he saw made his stomach contract with horror.

The centrepiece of the vast, cavernous room, the walls of which were lines with various glass cases, was the skeleton of a magnificent blue whale. It hung from the ceiling like a monstrous ghost, its hollow eye sockets gazing at the darkness. And underneath it, far from a skeleton but just as still, just as unseeing, was something that made Newt want to vomit.

The lifeless body of one of the security guards- a paunchy, ill-shaven man with greying brown hair- was suspended in mid-air, about 6 feet off the ground and a few feet below the whale's ribcage, as though in a domed sepulchre. And around him- like a coffin- goodness, what  _was_ that? Some kind of box, the sharp edges of a perfect cuboid made of a strange blue light. It looked much the way water does, when light bounces off it and onto a wall- but there was an odd... strength to it, an artificial quality, like a bolt of lightning or current of pure electricity. But it didn't look like any lightning he'd ever seen.

The sources of the voices- at least, he supposed they must be- were gathered underneath this macabre spectacle. They were a small group, of human height and shape, but clad from head to foot in sweeping, jet-black cloaks. A couple were facing his direction, their heads sealed within what looked like helmets that completely obscured their faces. They were as black as the cloaks, but near the top and base of each one was a small grate of tarnished, silvery metal- one to see and the other to breathe through, presumably. 

Suddenly, one of the figures withdrew from- his? The voices sounded vaguely masculine- from his cloak an elbow-length black rod resembling a magician's wand. Like a conductor at the Albert Hall, he pointed it in front of him and gave the thin air a sharp tap. Another glimmer of artificial light appeared and expanded, dividing into a criss-crossing network of buzzing yellow lines. It looked like- yes, there was the atrium- a perfect to-scale map of the museum. He shrank back, just a smidge, as the figures all clustered around it. The bizarre-sounding voices started up again, but lower and faster; they seemed to be conferring, presumably over the impossible thing in front of them.

Then one of them did something extremely odd. He- Newt had decided to think of them all as male, for simplicity's sake- pulled something from the folds of his own cloak. Squinting hard, Newt saw what looked like a large clump of fur, but it seemed to be... bloody hell, was it  _glowing?_ (For God's sake, why was _everything_ glowing?) Well, not exactly-little shimmering jets of light kept moving up and down it. Like racer snakes, Newt thought, or the first sparks of a firework. At any rate, they were thrown into the air, and to Newt's shock they did not float or tumble to the ground but hovered, as still as the corpse above them. Then, suddenly, they re-formed into a humming, floating clump which zoomed towards... 

They had landed in the top right corner of the map- that, Newt knew, was where they kept the fossils of prehistoric creatures. 

The figures made more of those gargling, hissing noises and then, like soldiers, they turned and began to walk- right towards the corridor that Newt was lurking in.

He tried to move, but his limbs felt stiff and frozen and wouldn't behave; he staggered a couple of steps backwards, heart pounding- and his torch, slick with perspiration, slipped from his fingers and landed with a crash on the marble floor.

For about three seconds, every living thing in the vicinity became as still and silent as the dead that outnumbered them. Then the black-cloaked figures, with the deadly conviction of tigers on the hunt, sprung cheetah-like and shot towards him. At the same moment the sensation flooded back into Newt's limbs; without pausing to think, he turned and began to run- the heavy footfalls of those things far, far too close behind him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll have noticed that I've rather cruelly killed Theseus off before this story even starts. Having seen Crimes of Grindelwald I feel kinda bad about it now, but when I was writing this I honestly didn't expect him to survive that movie so I didn't think it would matter so much. Hope you can forgive me...
> 
> Next chapter: Newt and Tina aka the Doctor FINALLY meet ; )


End file.
